Saturday, October 15, 2016

Imperial Privilege: On War and Violence Near and Far

'Imperial privilege,' write the
authors, 'has distorted the political conversation in the United States by
allowing some questions of conscience to be heard while silencing others.'
(Photo: via Iran Daily)

“Imagining
politics as a form of war,” writes political scientist and philosopher Achilles
Mbembe, “we must ask: What place is given to life, death, and the human body
(in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order
of power?” When it comes to presidential elections in the United States, the
answer is “not much”—especially when those bodies are in faraway lands and
wounded or slain not by “terrorists” but by state actors. The ability of the
American electorate to shrug off the plight of those who suffer as the direct
result of U.S. foreign policy is so pervasive that it deserves a name. We call
it “imperial privilege.”

Indeed,
so pervasive is this particular form of privilege that it is not limited to the
“usual suspects,” e.g., militarists or right-wing politicians. Imperial privilege
makes it possible for even the liberally-inclined to turn a blind eye to the
toxic footprint of U.S. militarism at home and abroad; to fall silent at any
mention of the homicidal decisions of an American President; to exclude such
matters from public political discussion and to prevent them from influencing
their voting patterns in any way.

"Whether
by turning off the TV and heading to the mall, the movies, or for a hike in the
great outdoors, Americans may turn off war with a click. People in countries
such as Yemen where U.S. armament sales fuel the devastation of war do not
enjoy that option."

Despite
the fact that the Black Lives Matter movement has made the nation aware of the
militarization of our police, the use of tanks and teargas on the streets of
American cities shocks the conscience only of a vocal minority. The connections
that exist between police violence at home and U.S. militarism abroad has
little salience as an election issue. Instead, Donald Trump’s belligerent
racism and xenophobia have captured the attention of many people of colour and
their liberal white allies and convinced them to support Hillary Clinton. Trump
and everything he stands for are surely offensive, but are they necessarily
more offensive than Clinton’s history of cold and calculated hawkishness? Has
the human toll of that hawkishness proved to be any less racist?

We are
told that refusing to vote for Clinton constitutes a particular type of
privilege, because communities of colour will suffer most under a Trump presidency.
But imperial privilege allows Americans (black, brown, and white) to focus only
on the “homeland” and ignore the consequences of their political choices for
any other country. There is a disturbing moral disconnect here. Voters who
support a candidate that recognizes black lives matter nevertheless avert their
gaze in good conscience from the thousands who are killed as a direct result of
that same candidate’s interventionist policies. Voters scandalized when a
child’s life is jeopardized during a domestic police confrontation regard the
slaughter of large numbers of children in other countries as regrettable but
inevitable “collateral damage.” They call for context. But what context
justifies the taking of innocent lives? “Collateral” and “context” then become
part of the lexicon of imperial privilege.

The
American Empire is not a physical empire as were the European Empires of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rather than colonies it has bases, command
posts, zones, etc. and reserves the right to invade and occupy any region of
the world where it considers its interests endangered. Such interests are
material as well as strategic. These are the new “colonies” and, as Mbembe
indicates, “the sovereign right to kill is not subject to any rule in the
colonies. In the colonies, the sovereign might kill at any time or in any
manner.”

Americans
enjoy the luxury to turn away from pictures of violent conflict: of children
smeared with blood and mud, of refugees living in desperate conditions. Whether
by turning off the TV and heading to the mall, the movies, or for a hike in the
great outdoors, Americans may turn off war with a click. People in countries
such as Yemen where U.S. armament sales fuel the devastation of war do not
enjoy that option. Neither do the people of Gaza who suffer daily from the
Israeli government’s routine employment of excessive force—violence
underwritten by U.S. military, economic, and political support. The luxury to
turn away is imperial privilege.

While
race as a biopolitical category is recognized within the U.S. social order, it
is only too often invisible beyond that order, and that invisibility allows
people of all races to participate in the creation of killable populations in
other countries. This fact places Americans of colour in the uncomfortable and
untenable position of racializing foreign peoples and, further, of acting on
that racialization through their participation in (and/or support of) the
military. Consider this analogy: would the American electorate support a
proposal to arm Denmark so that it could bomb Norway? Probably not; and yet it
has supported arming the Saudis so that they can bomb the Yemen. Imperial
privilege hides in plain sight this manifestation of racialized hierarchies in
the world order.

In short,
imperial privilege has distorted the political conversation in the United
States by allowing some questions of conscience to be heard while silencing
others. We wish to break that silence.

This work
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Rashna Batliwala Singh received
her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is a
Visiting Professor at Colorado College.

Peter Matthews Wright received his Juris Doctor from Duquesne
University School of Law and his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Associate Professor and Chair of
Religion at Colorado College.

"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs